Julia Logo: Commercial Font

It’s a pity that the font in Julia’s logo, MN Latin, is commercial. Apparently it comes bundled with MacOS but as a Windows user that doesn’t help much.

I did find Tamil MN in the https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia-logo-graphics repository but not the original logo font.

Since it’s probably illegal to ask for the font, I will refrain from doing so. However, maybe there exist good free alternatives that look similar?

I’d appreciate any pointers.

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That is the original font, afaict:


Outline is Tamil MN with -65 letter spacing (in Photoshop).
And IIRC all MN family fonts have the same latin chars, so they can be used interchangeably here.

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Oh, my bad. Thanks!

I was looking at this version by @cormullion and the “programming language” part seemed to be in a different font (of course, this isn’t part of the official logo). I’ll check again.

The MN Latin font works well in the Julia logo, but it’s a bit odd generally, and isn’t highly regarded for general design work (“MN Latin”: Latin characters of MN fonts bundled with macO… | Flickr). Usually it’s not a problem to use one font for a logotype and a different one for related text; some companies might use the same font for both logo and general use, but others would/could never do that.

You shouldn’t feel you have to use MN Latin for every Julia-related heading. … :slight_smile:

I think I used the new cut of Helvetica (Helvetica Now) for the text. Probably would use something different next time.

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Which fonts are at the top of your list for this purpose?

That’s a question… :slight_smile: At the moment I’m interested in open-source fonts, probably as a result of working with Julia, so I’m trying things like IBM Plex.

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I wasn’t able to find a Windows/Ubuntu font that is similar to the MN-type fonts – does anyone have any pointers on that?

Any reason to not just install the ttf in the above-linked repo?

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I’m guessing that it’s licensed only to Mac owners, so as soon as you ‘install’ it to a Windows/Ubuntu OS, you’re committing type piracy. Aaaarrgh, me hearties! :slight_smile:

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Not a good one! I somehow managed to miss that there was a font folder at the repo root. Thanks, folks.

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